but i don't think i should go much further until i figure some stuff out, namely rendering. can someone please outline rendering to me in java game programming terms and how i implement it into my code? or even a link that explains graphics rendering in java? so many render() methods and i don't understand exactly how they are working

I personally use lwjgl for 3D rendering in java and Slick2D for rendering 2D.

For both libraries there are a few tutorials on the website of lwjgl: http://lwjgl.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page#Getting_started. I personally used this tutorials and must say after doing a few of them I understoot how rendering works (at least with this library). The code is pretty clean so it should be fairly simple to see what is going on.

Well it is possible but for 2D I would really suggest Slick2D. The reason comes from there site to be honest ;):
Slick2D is an easy to use set of tools and utilites wrapped around LWJGL OpenGL bindings to make 2D Java game development easier.

Actually, lwjgl is an OpenGL binding for Java, and slick2d is an lwjgl wrapper that handles the projection issues needed to render in 2D with OpenGL behind the scenes, and exposes a 2D API. In short, lwjgl can do 2D or 3D, and slick2d uses it to make it easier to do 2D.